by Ingrid Black
“Assuming, Chief Superintendent?” said Butler quizzically.
“Call it an educated guess then. Why would he drive all the way out here with Hudson’s car, only to come back a second time and double his chances of being seen?”
“Trial run?” I offered.
“Too risky,” she said.
“Murderers do strange things,” Healy said.
“Remember we don’t know he is a murderer,” pointed out Fitzgerald. “We only have Leon Kaminski’s word for that. The police in New York still don’t think he killed anyone.”
“He acts like a murderer,” I said. “Sneaking around, nameless, invisible.”
“Does that make Kaminski a murderer too?”
“Kaminski?”
“He’s been sneaking around as well. Again, we only have his word for it that he’s looking for his wife’s killer. I don’t like it when so much hangs on one man’s testimony.” She sighed. “For that matter, how do we know it isn’t Randall’s body in the boot? This is totally different from the MO Randall himself’s used so far. ”
“You mean he met... what did you say his name was again?” said Healy.
“Peters, according to the witness.”
“He’s arranged to meet this Peters then – Peters, whoever he is, murders him – stuffs him in the boot – pushes the car into the water.”
“That’s what I was considering,” said Fitzgerald.
“What about the other man who was seen by Bryce in the front seat?”
“You got me on that one.”
“Randall certainly didn’t seem to act like a man with something to hide,” I admitted grudgingly. “Driving up to a complete stranger out of the blue and starting a conversation with him isn’t the best plan of action if you’re trying to dispose secretly of a body in the trunk of the car you’ve let witnesses see you driving.”
But no, Randall couldn’t be dead, I told myself firmly, refusing to follow my imagination down that avenue, because he’d subsequently contacted Kaminski to claim Marsha Reed’s murder for himself. He mustn’t have expected to meet anyone out here, I decided. The line about Peters must’ve been the first thing that came into his head to cover his back. Though wouldn’t killing Bryce have covered it better?
For once, I could see the benefit of Alastair Butler’s way of doing things. Speculation wasn’t getting us anywhere. First we needed to know who was dead in the trunk.
Everything else would flow from that.
“I’d say it’s over to you, Doc,” I told Butler.
“Don’t expect any miracles,” he murmured disapprovingly. “I only perform those on Sundays.” And with that, he and Fitzgerald went off to get themselves suitably boiler-suited for the gruesome task ahead. Fitzgerald did not look like she was relishing the prospect.
“I still don’t see what any of this has to do with Marsha Reed,” said Healy when we were left alone with the cold coffee and he was standing at the window watching them go.
I couldn’t see any obvious connection either, but didn’t want to admit it.
“One thing at a time,” I said carelessly instead.
“You’re not wrong there,” he said. “In this job, one at a time is more than enough.”
Chapter Thirty
“Is it so absurd?” I asked Fisher later as we sat in Fitzgerald’s office in Dublin Castle.
“That Buck Randall would come to Dublin to kill Hudson?” said Fisher. “Not absurd, no. Personally I’ve never come across it before, but I’ve certainly read of similar cases.”
Late afternoon was mingling into early evening. For the first time in weeks, low clouds had rolled in and were sagging heavily on the tops of buildings. There might even be rain later. I couldn’t remember the last time it rained. The city needed it. Already there was relief in the streets below that the incessant jabbing of the sun’s rays had eased temporarily.
A moment earlier, Fitzgerald had got off the phone to Alastair Butler to confirm that the body in the trunk really was that of the missing Mark Hudson. Unsurprisingly, there was no possibility of a visual identification - the water had seen to that – but Hudson’s driver’s license had been found in an inside pocket of the victim’s jacket, as well as his house keys, and a wallet containing a couple of credit and store cards in his name.
More to the point, since those could have been planted on the body, Fitzgerald had already had the foresight to pull in Hudson’s dental records before the body was returned to the mortuary for the autopsy. It was a relatively simple matter once the victim was X-rayed to establish that it was indeed Cecilia Corrigan’s unfortunate neighbour dead in his own car.
What Butler also found was a non-fatal wound to the back of the head, probably caused by some ordinary metal household tool such as a poker, as well as high levels of a particular brand of insecticide still remaining in the victim’s body. It suggested that Hudson had been poisoned, though whether it would be possible to ever completely prove that this was how he met his death, considering the deteriorated state of the remains, was another matter. He may have been dead already when the wound was inflicted to his head. Butler still couldn’t determine whether the wound was post mortem or ante mortem. More tests would be needed to prove that. All we knew for certain is that Mark Hudson’s killer had exhibited an entirely different MO from the man who killed Marsha Reed. Unless that was the point. Unless the change of tactic was nothing but a ruse designed, staged again, to throw Buck Randall’s pursuers off the scent. Presuming, that is, that Buck Randall was the killer.
Right now, he was the only angle we had to go on.
Randall’s presence in the city had not been adequately explained.
He was seen with a car belonging to Mark Hudson at the water’s edge.
The car was recovered with Hudson’s murdered body inside.
Randall’s fingerprints were, we had since learned, all over the interior.
Concluding that Buck Randall had serious questions to answer was not jumping to conclusions. It was simply following the evidence to its logical end.
But there was still the small question of why a prison guard from Huntsville, Texas, would come all this way to murder a man who had, apparently accidentally, killed a woman who had been writing to a prisoner the guard had known on Death Row.
Did it have anything to do with the death of the woman in New Mexico? If not, then the whole thing was a coincidence, and I believed in those even less than I believed in fairies.
“Maybe Jenkins Howler just asked him to do it,” said Fitzgerald.
“Why?” said Healy.
“Why did he agree to do it, do you mean, or why did Howler want him to?”
“Both.”
“Starting with the second, Howler might’ve believed that Hudson deliberately killed Cecilia Corrigan,” she said. “We still can’t say for definite that he didn’t. We’ve no reason to suppose that he did, but that only means we have no evidence, not that it didn’t happen.”
“OK then,” said Healy, “I’ll accept that, but why then would this Buck Randall agree to do it? Cecilia wasn’t his pen friend. She meant nothing to him.”
“But Howler meant something to him,” I said. “You heard how close the two of them were. They were thick as thieves.”
“Thick as murderers even,” murmured Walsh, who was sitting with his feet up on the windowsill, drinking a cup of coffee, and absently sending text messages on his cellphone as we all talked. From the frequency with which they were coming I suspected it must be one of his latest conquests. I hadn’t even thought he was listening properly. Obviously I was wrong.
“Exactly,” I said. “If Howler asked him, he might’ve felt it was his duty to do it.”
“A doomed friend’s last wish, you mean?” said Fisher.
“That’s not so unimaginable, is it?” I said.
“I already told you,” said Fisher. “It’s not unimaginable at all. Many perpetrators have committed murder in the past in order to please another
person, a person who meant a lot to them. That’s why we have laws against committing murder by proxy. If it didn’t and couldn’t happen, there’d be no point having a law against it.”
“I thought murder by proxy usually meant contract killings,” said Walsh.
“Those are the most common kind of proxy killings, where you simply pay someone to commit the murder that you are either unable or unwilling to commit yourself.”
“But you don’t think that’s what happened in this case?”
“I suppose Jenkins Howler may have found some convoluted way of financially reimbursing Buck Randall for committing this murder on his behalf, but it all looks rather implausible,” confessed Fisher. “More likely, if he did come all this way to do this last favour for Howler, then it was because of a convergence of interests at that particular moment. They were each getting something out of it. Or he might not even have told Howler that he was going to do it. It might’ve been a posthumous tribute to a friend who’d died on Death Row.”
“You don’t think he was under Howler’s influence when he acted then?” I said.
“He might’ve been,” said Fisher, though he was so cool about the idea I guessed it wasn’t one he’d entertained for long. “If there is one thing habitual killers are good at, apart from not getting caught, it’s finding other human beings’ weak spots and exploiting them for their own ends. They use charm, cunning, fear, pity, whatever it takes to get what they want. Making it seem, for example, that they’re that person’s only friend, or that something bad will happen if they don’t do the thing which is being asked of them. They work at people insidiously until they do exactly what they’re being directed to do. They act out their will using other people as the weapons. What can I say? It happens. Many are weak, and the few are strong. The few are bound to prey on the many. It’s crime as Darwinism. The innocent often fall under the spell of psychopaths until they’re completely in their power.”
“If Kaminski’s right about Randall killing his wife and the other woman in New Mexico,” I pointed out, “he’s not so innocent.”
“I didn’t say it was only the innocent,” said Fisher. “In fact, if Randall did come to Dublin to kill Mark Hudson then it strongly suggests that he was the one who killed those two unfortunate women in the States, as your friend so vehemently suspects. Not least because the hold a killer has over a person who comes in his orbit inevitably diminishes the further that person gets in time and place from the source of the influence, and Buck Randall’s been away from Howler’s influence for months now. He’ll hardly still be acting under Howler’s control.”
“In other words, Randall killed Hudson because he wanted to, not because he was being compelled to in some way by Howler’s evil eye?”
“Undoubtedly. If he did kill Hudson, at any rate - which, I need hardly remind you, remains only a working hypothesis, however superficially attractive. I know, I know,” Fisher exclaimed, holding up his hand to repel our objections, “the fingerprints, the witness statements. But it’s still circumstantial evidence. It only means he was there.”
“I wonder if Howler knew Randall was a killer already,” I said, half to myself, ignoring his caveats.
“I seriously doubt that Randall would have taken the risk of letting him find out the precise details of his previous adventures,” said Fisher pointedly again. “It would have given Howler too much power, and Randall can’t be that stupid. In fact, that’s another discrepancy in this whole situation. Usually in these proxy relationships, there’s a dominant, clever, manipulative one, and a weaker, more submissive partner. Here it’s not so easy to disentangle which was which. It could be that Randall was the dominant one in the relationship all along. He may have been the one who latched onto Howler, feeding off his energy in some malignant way, not the other way round. Or maybe it’s simply a meeting of minds, like souls with the same appetites and desires being drawn together.”
“Like falling in love,” I said.
“Now you mention it, that’s another discrepancy,” Fisher said. “These kinds of interdependent murderous relationships I’m talking about generally have some sexual basis. The wife or girlfriend of the killer does what he asks of them, even becoming a murderer in their own right, because they want to keep the connection they have with this man going, or to maintain an erotic intensity of the relationship that needs blood to feed on. There’s nothing to suggest there was anything like this between Buck Randall and Jenkins Howler.”
“They could’ve been doing one another through the bars,” remarked Walsh appreciatively. He offered the room a wide grin and got stony faces in reply.
“You know, Walsh,” said Fitzgerald, “sometimes I worry about you.”
“I’m serious, Chief,” said Walsh. “I had a drink once with this prison officer who worked up in the women’s wing at Mountjoy. There was one girl in for shoplifting who used to offer him all sorts of off the cuff services in her cell. It happens all the time.”
“I’m surprised you don’t quit and put in an application up there yourself,” I said.
He looked offended.
“I don’t need to. This guy was one ugly fucker. He needed all the help he could get.” Suddenly he stopped himself. “Oh, sorry for swearing, Chief.”
Fitzgerald simply shook her head in bewilderment.
“Can we get back to the subject?” she said wearily.
“To be fair,” said Fisher, suppressing a smile, “it’s not such an outlandish suggestion. Prisoners and prison officers do often find themselves in inappropriate sexual relationships. You don’t stop being a sexual being just because you’ve been incarcerated. Prison officers have been known to abuse that need for intimacy to satisfy their own desires. It’s a power thing. But in this instance? I don’t know enough about them to rule it out or in.”
“That’s why I’ve asked the police in Texas and the prison authorities there to send us all they have on Buck Randall,” explained Fitzgerald. “The more we know about him, the easier it will be to predict his next move. Predict it, and, let’s hope, prevent it.”
“I only hope there’s enough in what they send to get some handle on this man,” said Fisher. “Right now, I feel like I’m blundering about in a room where all the windows have been blacked out. It’s like making a psychiatric assessment on a patient that you’ve never even met and whose actions and motivations you only ever hear about third and fourth-hand.”
“Anything that helps find him is an improvement on where we are now,” said Fitzgerald. “Though I have to tell you that, from what I’ve heard so far, Randall had an exemplary record as an employee. There wasn’t a single official complaint against him.”
“He did drink, didn’t he, according to one report?” I said.
She acknowledged it with a nod.
“There’s a possible angle. Drink’s a classic disinhibitor,” Fisher pointed out.
“Finding an American in the city has to be easier than finding a local, at any rate,” I added. “We know from the witness on Bull Island that Randall’s making no effort to conceal his accent. How many Americans can there be here? At the very least, he has to be living somewhere, eating somewhere, getting money somewhere. He’ll have left a trace.”
“Unless he’s being sheltered by someone,” Healy suggested.
“No object moves through space without causing some disturbance,” I said. “And Randall doesn’t seem to want to move through it without causing some ripples at least.”
“You mean Kaminski?” said Fitzgerald.
“I do. It’s no fun for him playing his games alone. He wants others to join in too.”
“Two may be company,” said Healy, “but he might consider us joining in as well to constitute a crowd.”
“Then we’d better do all we can,” said Walsh, “to make sure he doesn’t know we have joined the game.”
“Isn’t that going to be a bit difficult,” I pointed out, “when he notices on the news that we’ve dredged up the ev
idence of his latest handiwork from Dublin Bay?”
Chapter Thirty-One
“There’s a message for you,” said the doorman Hugh when I finally made it through the front door of my building at eight o’clock that evening, looking forward to a shower and a drink.
I recognised Kaminski’s handwriting at once when I took the envelope from him.
I tore it open, and read the message inside.
I’ll pick you up outside at 8.30.
The letters RSVP had been added in, then crossed out.
“When did this come?” I asked Hugh.
Hugh looked uncomfortable.
“I’ve been busy,” he said. “Mrs Williams upstairs had a busted cistern again, I had to put out the bins...”
“What time did it come, Hugh?”
“About nine this morning,” he said sheepishly.
“In other words, it was already sitting in my mailbox about an hour before I stood here talking to you about your bunions, and you didn’t even give it to me?”
“It was my ingrown toenail actually,” said Hugh.
“That’s not really the point, is it?”
“I’m sorry, my mind was on other things...”
“Forget it,” I sighed. “It’s done.”
I checked my watch.
It was now five after eight. I still had time to get ready if I got moving. There was no question but that I was going to accept the invitation. If Kaminski had decided to end his sulk, I wasn’t about to screw it up because my doorman was a certifiable idiot.
I ran upstairs and into my apartment. Quickly checked that there were no messages waiting for me on the phone. There weren’t. Another five minutes to shower and pull on a clean pair of jeans and a shirt, and as long as it took to send a hurried and badly-spelt text message to Fitzgerald explaining what I was doing, and I was back down in the lobby again before the clock had reached the half hour.
Hugh was sitting with his feet up in his small office, watching soccer on TV.